IBM to acquire Confluent

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Impact on Confluent Employees & Shareholders

  • IBM is paying a ~30% premium on the stock, so shareholders (including many employees) get cash, but the price is well below IPO and prior highs, so the outcome depends on individual option strike prices.
  • Many expect the usual big‑co pattern: key “essential” staff get sizeable multi‑year retention bonuses; redundant functions (sales, HR, finance, etc.) are cut over 2–5 years.
  • Short term, engineering/product likely continue mostly unchanged; medium term, IBM culture and processes seep in, Confluent leadership exits when their lockups/retention end, and more staff turnover is expected.
  • Several people with prior IBM acquisition experience describe a honeymoon followed by growing bureaucracy, byzantine internal systems, and attrition of the most motivated people. A minority report relatively hands‑off treatment and decent comp/benefits.

Kafka, Confluent, and Alternatives

  • Multiple commenters call this a “great time to be a Kafka alternative,” citing Redpanda, Pulsar, NATS, Iggy, etc. Redpanda gets repeated praise for performance, cost, and ease of ops, but is proprietary and seen as vulnerable to the same “enshittification” forces.
  • Critiques of Confluent: expensive cloud offering, significant operational headaches at scale, strategy chasing buzzwords, and a Kafka ecosystem that has been more incremental than innovative.
  • Strong debate over Kafka’s necessity:
    • Some argue most deployments could use simpler patterns (SQL polling, RabbitMQ, NATS), and Kafka is overused as a “magic scalability” badge.
    • Others stress Kafka’s value for very high‑volume ETL and fan‑out, offset and consumer‑group management, and durability; DIY SQL‑based queues or small‑scale tricks are seen as fragile beyond modest scale.

“AI” Justification

  • Many see IBM’s AI framing (“smart data platform for AI”) as marketing: “something something data, something something AI.”
  • Others note that event streams and EDA are genuinely important inputs for real‑time and agentic AI, and Kafka has deep enterprise penetration, so there is some technical logic even if the messaging is buzzword‑heavy.

IBM’s Reputation & Strategy

  • Widespread skepticism that IBM will improve the product or culture: IBM is portrayed as a consulting‑ and license‑driven machine optimizing for lock‑in, margins, and cross‑selling, not product excellence.
  • Past acquisitions (Red Hat, HashiCorp, DataStax, SoftLayer, Lotus/FileNet, etc.) are cited as cautionary: initial autonomy followed by layoffs, license/packaging changes, and gradual cultural erosion.
  • A few counterpoints highlight IBM’s serious R&D (quantum, semiconductors, cryptography) and successful long‑term survival, but even these tend to separate “interesting labs” from the enterprise software/consulting side.

Vendor Risk & Market View

  • Commenters warn that relying on specialized managed OSS vendors (Confluent, DataStax, Ahana, etc.) carries significant acquisition and pricing risk; some prefer cloud‑native Kafka‑like services despite limitations.
  • Confluent is described as a company with strong revenue but unsustainable sales/marketing spend; some argue IBM may simply be imposing overdue discipline, even if it feels brutal internally.